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"She was looking at the podium and then looking away again and it just seemed very suspicious the way that she was acting, her trolley was about three quaters full.

"I approached her in the car park and when I approached she shut her boot. I asked her if I could see her receipt and she said yes of course and started looking in her bag. She could not produce a receipt so I asked her if she went through a manned or self service checkout and invited her back into the store to point out which till she had used.

"At this point she told me that she was in a rush so could not stay and chat."

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Mark Wood on defence said that there was no evidence to support his comments about her demenour at the store as acting suspicious as other CCTV footage showed that she was walking about leisurely doing her shopping and was described as a "normal shopping experience."

He told the court that Mrs Chapman had in fact been on anti depressants that had made her confused and forgetful.

When called to the stand Mrs Chapman said: "I do not recall any of these events, obviously I can see by the CCTV footage that I pushed the trolley out of the shop but I did not take these items deliberately.

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"The anti depressant tablets have affected me in the way that they have made my life a blur. I'm forgetting things all the time, I even forgot to pick up my daughter from nursery.

"I have no memory of these shopping trips and would have never intentionally walked out without paying. My life has been an absolute mess for quite some time with suffering from depression and having a bad home life and marital troubles at the time.

"I just wasn't thinking. I had recently been switched onto these tablets and I was still getting use to the dosage and was taking them in the morning without any breakfast which it turns out I wasn't suppose to do."

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Chairman of the magistrates Ian McDonnell said: "We have found you to be not guilty of this offence because we believe you did not intend to steal those items. It was a very unusual thing that you would have been approached by a security officer at one store but then commit two further offences.

"Its really bizarre. You are a mother who has no previous convictions and are of a good character and we believe that you did not intentionally take those items, but it was due to the medication that you were on that contributed to this situation."